


never fall apart

by selinipainter



Series: between the lines [3]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: (kinda sorta???), Character Study, F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-07
Updated: 2015-08-07
Packaged: 2018-04-13 11:27:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4520124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/selinipainter/pseuds/selinipainter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>you can't make homes out of human beings.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>Bellamy knows this, because he tried.</p>
            </blockquote>





	never fall apart

_‘Mom, mom, what do you think Icarus said when he got to the sun?’_

 

  ** _i._**

 

Bellamy was about nine years old and Octavia, all of six years sat quietly beside him. She nearly escaped out of the room when their mom forgot to lock the door. She still didn’t understand why she needed to stay and Bellamy and Mom got to leave. Why she cannot follow them. So, their mom picked up a scrap of paper and a pencil.

“Octavia, why do you think you can’t leave home?” she said and Octavia shrugged.

Mom carefully explained it, writing it out as she went. When the list was done, she gave it to Octavia.

That was the first of them. Later, there were lists of facts Octavia wrote down. Because she liked collecting little facts; one day, it had been the ways stars died. Another day, it was false historical facts. There had been a week when she had been crazy about the weird habits of Earth animals. There were also lists for chores, lists for whose turn it was to do the hem work and whose turn it was to do the mending.

Bellamy began making lists of things Octavia needed, lines and bullet points he scrawled down his arms because they were the kind of lists that should never be found in the back of his books . Besides, the scrap papers were for Octavia. The ink washed away eventually, but the words remained in his head. He got good at it, remembering rows of things. It was not difficult, just like recalling all the names and deeds of all those Roman emperors.

 

_Things for Octavia:_

     -        _new clothes_  
     -        _shoes, proper shoes_  
     -        _books  
_      -        _stars (one day)_

 

It is easy like dancing with Octavia in their room, easy like piggybacks and midnight stories with Mom. Easy like history and facts and dates, and he kinda liked school and he was kinda good at it.

 

 

_**vi.** _

 

Relearning how to breathe is not difficult, not as hard as restarting his heart. There’s Octavia, and Monty and Miller and all his people. He can do this. Keep them safe, for _her_. But first for himself, first for their sakes. He has to sort out his priorities. And gods, he knows he should run after her.

Octavia is the beat of his heart, but Clarke’s undefined something is terrifying in its own right and he can’t let go, he can’t _hecan’t comebackdon’tleave_ all tangled up in some kind of mess of _aloneyou left me alone ican’tdothiswithoutyou i NEEDyou_ and some days, Bellamy blinks back the imprints of the red and white canvas roof before he picks himself up for the day.

(Because the sight of his tent’s roof is more familiar than the black fall into sleep. And isn’t that fucked up as hell?)

He can’t help but feel like a tree, growing in the middle of a raging river. A tree with spreading, growing branches but half of his roots are giving out with distance and time.  The other roots in Octavia, digging into her strength because she always is there to shoulder the burden. And the 46 because this is all he has left of the first home they had. This is all he has, and he will be damned if he lets them be taken again.

“Over my dead body, over my dead body,” he bites out when thoughts of Lexa and the Grounders stray into his head on night watch. The Mountain Men are not a problem, thank fuck. They are half his nightmares, the other half is blonde hair staining a steady red, his sister dying and he is left all alone. He is always alone.

Of course, the nightmares are not the only things that plague him at night. There are the memories of what happened in Mount Weather, the scrape of scrubs and brushes, of being reduced to the sum of his parts, the worth of his blood. Of the burn of the fire licking at his back, because he thought he was going to die there in a service vent. Of the fear of dying alone, dying there because no one would ever know. No one, not Clarke, not Octavia, Miller, Monty. And he had promised to come back.

 

 

_**ii.** _

 

There were no rivers on the Ark, no forests or oceans either. The closest they ever got were the holos (not good enough) and the distant glimpses of green and blue through the windows (too good to be ever enough). So, Bellamy never fully understood when his mother said he had the patience of a river, which is to say nothing at all really. (He didn’t think his mother did either, but what the hell did he know?)

Of course, it was better than Octavia who is in turn so still; that only the tangle of her little fingers in his reminded him of her being there, and so bright that there were claws digging into his throat because she was too good to be kept in this small room forever and ever andeverandever.

That’s where it started, wanting to run and run till his feet bled except there was nowhere to run. Once, he had run into a girl who had asked him, “Are you running to or from?”. He could only remember that she was small, perhaps just a touch older than Octavia. Her blue eyes were calm and still as the water of earth.

It never really stopped him from trying though, to escape the claws and to escape because he could.

That day, he had learnt about lilacs and peonies and lilies, narcissus and roses, flowers that he will only ever know the name and pictures of. He went home, weighed with a few sheets of ill-gotten paper. He couldn’t show O the holo projections, couldn’t give shape to the flat colours in his textbooks. But he could give her paper flowers, poor things as they were. But the little paper flowers would last longer than actual ones. She beamed at him, star bright and it raked him somewhere he couldn’t name that here, _here_  was something good, something bright that the world could never touch. But she couldn’t touch the world either.

He was an old hand at it though, at stamping down the urge to run. He still didn’t know the answer to the girl’s question.

 

 

_**v.** _

 

He thinks this might be considered stalking. Raven tells him considered is too weak a word. He just… he misses his little sister. He misses her more at this moment than when they had been separated by prisons and mountains, back when he thought he’d never see her again. Back when he thought she had died in the bomb, back when he thought he would die crawling around the mountain. He had learnt to let go, learnt to let his hands give, let others carry her weight. He learns much later that she has always carried her own weight. _She was already strong._

It doesn’t make it go away, makes the missing of the weight of her curled around him while their mother told them stories of Greeks and war, love, anger, and loss. He misses going home to that.He misses that a lot; having a home to go back too. It doesn’t stop him for regretting the relief he feels at the time, the weight of _my responsibility_ gone because he loves Octavia. But sometimes he thinks, no five year old should have had to be responsible for another person. No eight year old should have known how to bite his tongue when there was hunger clawing in his throat and food secreted away in pockets he could not touch. She was already strong, but she had made him grow stronger.

He thinks he will always miss Octavia now.

 

 

_**iii.** _

 

 _Ring a ring round the roses_  
_Pocket full of posies_  
_Ashes, ashes_  
_We all fall down._

Typical, of all the old Earth rhymes that remain in this tin can, it had to be the one about the black plague. Typical that Octavia loved it.

Typical that when the guards had her, the only thing that Bellamy registered absently in the panic is the strains of the stupid rhyme. And Octavia’s _how do I get home, Bell._ Where _was_ home going to be now?

 

 

_**iv.** _

 

He wakes up. There is a pounding behind his eyes and a scream choking in his throat. He thinks it might be cold because he is shivering. But this is not shivering. This is shaking from terror and memory and _remembering_. It is still dark out and he blinks back the nightmare-memory, blinks it back, shut down. Reboot. Compartmentalize. Slowly, he makes a list.

 

_Things he wants:_

     -        _Octavia safe_  
     -        _Food_  
     -        _More history books_  
     -        _To have mom back_  
     -        _To go home_  
     -        ~~To have never been born~~  
     -        _Clarke to ~~never have left~~ (be ok)  
     _ -        _Sleep, jesus some actual proper sleep_

 

His hands still, his breathing evens out and absently, he makes another list. Things he actually gets: _none of the above._

 

 

 _ **vii.**_  

 

This is what he does when Clarke comes back. He picks up the bowls and continues washing up. He tucks them away, neat and ordered before returning to his tent. He can do this song and dance with her, stepping forward while she steps back and so they will go.

But not right now, not when he has spent nearly a year working himself to the bone because anything less than fatigue drags up the nightmares. Anything less that exhaustion leaves him with broken sleep and bleeding palms. Anything less, and he feels like he will fall and fall and fall into oblivion; all he has to do is let go.

He has not thought about her in nearly three months, has not spoken about her for even longer. It is not that he is running away from her. It’s just that he only has a finite capacity and he can only care about the living, the ones who stayed. It’s a trick he learnt when he had to let Octavia leave with Lincoln all those days ago.

(Funny how it felt like years and years of separation and distance.)

He doesn’t bother to seek out Clarke because the first thing he thought when he heard of her return is this:

_I loved you enough to burn._

And this: _You still left._

 

_‘Oh how I have longed for you,’ his mum whispers to him in the dark of the night, hands curled around her swelling belly._

 

 

 

 

 

_**coda:** _

 

He wakes up, sheets twisting in his legs. One day, he wakes up and realises that he slept a full night, that he didn’t feel hungry or cold.

He sits up, breathes and then slips on his shoes, shrugs on his jacket and walks out of the tent. He looks up at the sky, and says to the sun, “It’s not much maybe, but it’s home.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first time I wrote in 5 months? Though this story was months in the making. Thank you to [Avery](http://archiveofourown.org/users/bookworminpearls/pseuds/bookworminpearls) who fixed up a lot of stuff, especially all the tenses omg.
> 
> The title of this piece is from Our Own House by Misterwives. Specifically, for this bit:
> 
>    
>  _And we swore on that day_  
>  _That it will never fall apart_
> 
> Come cry on [tumblr](http://kalawxlf.tumblr.com) with me about all the Bellamy feels


End file.
